A picture's beauty does not depend on the things portrayed in it.

The charms of the passing woman are generally in direct ratio to the swiftness of our passage.

This labour of the artist to discover a means of apprehending beneath matter and experience, beneath words, something different from their appearance, is of an exactly contrary nature to the operation in which pride, passion, intelligence and habit are constantly engaged within us when we spend our lives without self-communion, accumulating as though to hide our true impressions, the terminology for practical ends which we falsely call life.

The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.

We are all of us obliged, if we are to make reality endurable, to nurse a few little follies in ourselves.

It is the tragedy of other people that they are to us merely showcases for the very perishable collections of our own mind.

For each illness that doctors cure with medicine, they provoke ten in healthy people by inoculating them with the virus that is a thousand times more powerful than any microbe: the idea that one is ill.